1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for acknowledging incoming messages.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
Modern computing systems may include parallel computers that include a plurality of compute nodes. The compute nodes may exchanges messages with each other and require that a receiving compute node acknowledges the receipt of a message. Acknowledging messages during periods of heavy network traffic can increase network congestion. Conversely, waiting to send acknowledgment messages until period of low network traffic can cause the sender of a message to be forced to wait long periods for an acknowledgment that the message was received.